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We don't have senior engineers anymore

sibelius.substack.com

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Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#61

Post by proc0 »

baz00 wrote: post #40

I'm sure I'll get downvoted for this one, but can we stop using the word engineer in the commercial software and startup sector entirely. It's mostly hacking, fucked up things that make you cry, turds smeared all over stuff, religious factions fighting over faith (marketing) arguments and embarrassing catwalk fashion show bullshit. None of that is engineering . I'm only here because for some insane fucked up reason,…

It's just a label at this point, and it really means technical product owner. I'd be ok with an engineering license, because maybe then it would be clear what kind of tasks engineers should be engaging in.

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#62

Post by weego »

Maybe I'll burn some Internet points here but

How the computer works, from electrons to transistors, to CPU, assembly, and high-level programming languages.

How the internet/network works, how you send some information from one computer to another, all OSI 7 Layers.

Engineers who fixate on this kind of detail are useless to most businesses most of the time.

If you structure everything on reducing, and value people only on their ability to reduce, everything to first principles of how electricity works then you're wasting everyone's time.

I want senior engineers to:

Be up to date but pragmatic about patterns and solutions Be able to, within minutes of being asked, map that knowledge to new business needs, explain that thinking across non-technical stakeholders through to junior devs Be able to lead and execute a plan with a level of pragmatism that reflects the fact that businesses aren't playgrounds for indulging in their own fixations

If they're more worried about NAND gates then not only are they failing in their duties, the industry has failed in providing meaningful abstractions so that smart people aren't bogged down in cruft.

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#63

Post by dbalatero »

heywhatupboys wrote: post #13
arielweisberg wrote: post #3

Wait till they end up as staff or principal. Along with bad management they hollow out several hundred person orgs.

all titles except for the ones indicating executive or direct reports are meaningless. It is a game, where workers strife to be granted higher and higher titles, just because their peers and the industry does. There is no inherit requirements, I can start a company today and call everyone super duper staff engineer

It's meaningful insofar as you might want to continue to receive raises etc as your experience level goes up.

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#64

Post by EPWN3D »

The article describes two different learning styles and pronounces one as better than the other. Some people learn by trial and error (the "packers" I guess), and some people learn by stroking their neckbeards and thinking a lot (the "mappers").

How you learn doesn't matter -- the results you deliver do. This should be obvious in an engineering discipline. Physicists know better than to turn their noses at mechanical engineers for not studiously considering general relativity in their day to day work. Maybe the more computer science-oriented people in software should follow that example.

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#65

Post by davidzweig »

xyzelement wrote: post #21
boo-ga-ga wrote: post #18

Any article that splits people into two groups and says one group cannot inherently be good at something immediately puts me off, sorry.

So you are saying there are those who split people into two groups and those two do not, and the first group is inherently bad at writing articles?

Presumably authors of articles holding such a view/opinion as to split people into two groups do not hold such a view/opinion as an inherent characteristic of their being.

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#66

Post by heywhatupboys »

robertlagrant wrote: post #24
heywhatupboys wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

all titles except for the ones indicating executive or direct reports are meaningless. It is a game, where workers strife to be granted higher and higher titles, just because their peers and the industry does. There is no inherit requirements, I can start a company today and call everyone super duper staff engineer

They're not meaningless. Someone can get a line management role and be terrible technically. In fact that's a good thing to do with someone who's not good technically.

> all titles except for the ones indicating executive or direct reports are meaningless.

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#67

Post by boo-ga-ga »

philosopher1234 wrote: post #39
xyzelement wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are saying there are those who split people into two groups and those two do not, and the first group is inherently bad at writing articles?

This is the flaw in having an entirely hateful view of splitting, that view is itself an example of splitting. You have to instead believe that there is a time where it is appropriate and useful to split (e.g, war) and times where it isn’t (general thinking)

I get that splitting can be useful and logical in many particular situations. But when we talk about very general case like being a good engineer, it is definitely not a good way to reason.

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#68

Post by throwaway4233 »

The article misses out on the fact that, as human beings with varying tenure, exposure and interests, all mental maps are not similar. Which makes on often misjudge another engineer' skills or abilities as purely being "packers".

Lets take the example provided by the author about `Solving a Problem`,

It is always possible, that the engineer fixing the bug might not have a lot of time to spend on it, or the fix does not need to cover all edge cases and a quick fix is good enough based on their own mental map. But to an outsider, it might seems as if the engineer has not taken ample time to `understand the root cause of the error, and which assumptions are wrong in their mental model`, which is a valid thought, but not necessarily true.

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#69

Post by screwturner68 »

twelfthnight wrote: post #14

If there ever used to be "Senior Engineers", I wonder if it was because before there were so many fewer engineers and those who were engineers were the folks who were most interested in computers. Nowadays the field is lucrative and people do it for money, so the average dev is lower quality. Kind of like an eternal September situation.

I think you are on to something. When I started coding in 1980 you really had to figure things out and what you coded was your code, you wrote every bit of it. Why, because we didn't have Stackoverflow, Github or Google to help us out t best we had a friend who also liked to code and they might help you but it was still all you. Now coding seems a lot more like cutting and pasting of someone else's code and making it work for you, so much of the heavy lifting has been done by someone els, the equivalent of knowing how to drive vs knowing how to build the car that you are driving. As you said now being a programmer is where the money is, I can assure you that making big dollars was on nobodies mind in the '80's. If anything being a programmer back then was anti-social, something that people would make fun of you over not something that was praised now every unemployed idiot is encouraged to "learn to program". You did it because it was something that interested you, you enjoyed it and to be quiet frank unless you wanted to be a Cobal or PL1 programmer there weren't a lot of jobs out there certainly not for the PC.

So you've gone from a group of people that got into programming because it peaked their interest and their hobby became their occupation to a group of people who look at programming as a way to make a lot of money. I'm not saying these people aren't talented and don't enjoy what they do I just think they are coming from a different angle than us grey beards. I also think the real problem is figuring something out on your own is no longer a thing, if there's a problem you go straight to google for the answer and while efficient it screws with the learning process and it reduces new and novel ideas.

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#70

Post by travoltaj »

philosopher1234 wrote: post #39
xyzelement wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are saying there are those who split people into two groups and those two do not, and the first group is inherently bad at writing articles?

This is the flaw in having an entirely hateful view of splitting, that view is itself an example of splitting. You have to instead believe that there is a time where it is appropriate and useful to split (e.g, war) and times where it isn’t (general thinking)

So you're saying that the splitters are split into two groups? One group which knows when it's a good time to split, and the other group which doesn't?,
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